[Disclaimer:
The opinion expressed in this article are solely those of Frosty Wolldridge
and not necessary the opinion of NWV, its staff or other writers.]

After
church on Sunday, I purchased the lowest grade gasoline I could find
in Denver for $3.36 per gallon for my four-cylinder car. It ripped
a hole in my wallet! However, in Los Angeles, car owners pay a whopping
$3.86 for a gallon of gas. Diesel costs $4.17 per gallon in California.

In
London, according to my British contact David Hepper, English citizens
have paid an equivalent of $8.00 per gallon for the past several years.

While
Americans burn 20 million barrels of oil daily, the human race burns
a mind-numbing 84 million barrels of oil every single day of the year.

China,
closing in on the American Dream of a chicken in every pot and a car
in every garage, today adds 16 million automobiles to its roads annually.
They suffered a 60 mile traffic jam last fall, commonplace in Los
Angeles and Chicago! (Source: Brian Williams at NBC New) At China’s
current rate by 2030, according to James Howard Kunstler, author of
The Long Emergency, they expect to burn 98 million barrels
of oil daily! That’s one country with 1.3 billion people and
adding 8.0 million net gain annually. They will burn more gasoline
per day in the next 19 years, than the entire human race burns daily
in 2011.

To
display the dynamic of burning 84 million barrels of oil daily in
2011, let’s take an oil “drum” that holds 42 gallons.
It measures 20 inches at the base. If you take 84 million of them
and stood them side by side, they would create a “belt”
around the world at the equator of 25,000 miles. We fill all 84 million
of them with oil pumped from the ground and burn them down to nothing
but “carbon footprint” every single day of the year. (Source:
Dr. John Tanton, www.thesocialcontract.com) Check the carbon footprint
damage at www.350.org for the accelerating environmental damage to
our biosphere created from such a horrendous and continuous burn of
fossil fuels.

While
you and I may complain that gasoline costs too much and it’s
not back down to the .19 cents a gallon that I paid as a high school
kid, what will happen when gasoline reaches $10.00 per gallon and
higher? (Source: Chris Steiner’s book—$20 Per Gallon)
After that, what happens when it runs out?

Yes,
you will hear that the planet makes unlimited amounts of oil because
it’s busy under the surface creating black gold. You will hear
from others that we have enough oil for another 100 years. You will
hear all sorts of tales like the story about the preacher in Alaska
where he heard from an oil man that the tundra holds billions of barrels.
You will hear that Montana holds more oil than Saudi Arabia.

What
if none of that’s true? Anybody ever thought about the prospect
of running out of oil? What if unlimited oil is all conjecture? What
if, in fact, at some point in the future, the human race cannot pump
any more oil out of the ground? After all, this is a finite planet!

How
would we fill our tractors that plant the crops for the food we need?
How would we heat our homes—all 312 million of us?

As
a side note: what if the conjectures of unlimited supply proved to
be true? What if it didn’t run out and we continued endless
human expansion? Would any other life on this planet survive the human
onslaught? Other creatures suffer extinction at a rate of 80 to 100
species per day in 2011 from human encroachment. (Source: Norman Meyers,
Oxford, UK)

"The
cheap oil age created an artificial bubble of plentitude for a period
not much longer than a human lifetime....so I hazard to assert that
as oil ceases to be cheap and the world reserves move toward depletion,
we will be left with an enormous population...that the ecology of
the earth will not support. The journey back toward non-oil population
homeostasis will not be pretty. We will discover the hard way that
population hyper growth was simply a side-effect of the oil age. It
was a condition, not a problem with a solution. That is what happened
and we are stuck with it." --James Howard Kunstler, The
Long Emergency

What
if Kunstler is correct? Isn’t it interesting that M. King Hubbert,
the world renowned geologist, who predicted that the USA would drop
from 9.0 million barrels pumped daily to 3.1 million barrels by 1970,
proved correct? This is known as the “Hubbert Curve.”
His calculations in the Middle East, South America and Mexico show
oil fields draining emptier by the day!

In
his ground breaking book Peak Everything: Waking up to a Century
of Declines by Richard Heinberg, he addresses limited water,
resources, minerals and metals as our greatest crisis along with Peak
Oil. Is he wrong? Is his scientific research flawed?

What
about the mathematical deductions of limited oil, water and resources
by Chris Clugston in his work, “The real inconvenient truth—on
American sustainability: Anatomy of a Societal Collapse.”

Do
you think the preacher is correct? Or, do you think research scientists
provide greater gravity to the issue?

“As
we go from this happy hydrocarbon bubble we have reached now to a
renewable energy resource economy, which we do this century, will
the “civil” part of civilization survive? As we both know
there is no way that alternative energy sources can supply the amount
of per capita energy we enjoy now, much less for the 9 billion expected
by 2050. And energy is what keeps this game going. We are involved
in a Faustian bargain—selling our economic souls for the luxurious
life of the moment, but sooner or later the price has to be paid.”
--Walter Youngquist, energy

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I’ve
mentioned a few of the top world experts that tell us that we’re
like a brakeless train heading toward a washed-out bridge. Dr. Albert
Bartlett, physicist at the University of Colorado, said, “Humanity
does not understand the exponential growth equation. It cannot continue
and I am not optimistic about the future.” (Source: www.albartlett.org)

Fellow
Americans, within the next 24 years, if our Congress, presidents and
your silence continue unabated, your children will see 72 million
immigrants added to the United States. They will all be fighting for
gasoline, food, water and resources. Along with your children!

Listen
to Frosty Wooldridge on Wednesdays as he interviews
top national leaders on his radio show "Connecting the Dots"
at www.themicroeffect.com
at 6:00 PM Mountain Time. Adjust tuning in to your time zone.

Frosty
Wooldridge possesses a unique view of the world, cultures and families
in that he has bicycled around the globe 100,000 miles, on six continents
and six times across the United States in the past 30 years. His published
books include: "HANDBOOK FOR TOURING BICYCLISTS" ; �STRIKE THREE! TAKE
YOUR BASE�; �IMMIGRATION�S UNARMED INVASION: DEADLY CONSEQUENCES�; �MOTORCYCLE
ADVENTURE TO ALASKA: INTO THE WIND�A TEEN NOVEL�; �BICYCLING AROUND THE
WORLD: TIRE TRACKS FOR YOUR IMAGINATION�; �AN EXTREME ENCOUNTER: ANTARCTICA.�
His next book: �TILTING THE STATUE OF LIBERTY INTO A SWAMP.� He lives
in Denver, Colorado.